This essay looks at two popular and influential films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were both shot in New York City: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). It places them in film history, New York City history, and U.S. urban history more generally, finding that they offer an update on earlier century narratives of the connections between urban areas and deviant sexuality. In this modern version, it is not just a moral tale but also an economic one, where, because of the historical decline of the U.S. city and of New York in particular, sex work becomes a plausible, if unsettling means of support. These films find both narrative and spatial terms for advancing the contemporary antiurban narrative, envisioning New York as an impinging vertical space and seeing possible redemption only in the protagonists leaving the city.
Urban crime was a regular feature of both national and local news, particularly the riots in Watts in 1965 and in Detroit and Newark in 1967. Related images of violence and squalor were featured in any number of police dramas, including McCloud, NYPD, Kojak, and others.
2.
Quoted in Rick Pearlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Volume 2 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 530.
3.
One ad had Nixon facing the camera and saying, "There is no cause that justifies the rule by mob instead of by reason," in James David Barber, The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing, 1992), 301; while another showed a middle-aged women in an obvious urban setting clutching her hand bag in fright as the voice over recites, "Crimes of violence have almost doubled in recent years. Today a violent crime is committed almost every 60 seconds, etc." Karen S. Johnson-Cartee and Gary Copeland, The Manipulation of the American Voter: Political Campaign Commercials (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 159-60. Another defining episode in the Nixon administration’s treatment of sex and morality was its response to the September 30, 1970, Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography’s final report, stating that all laws prohibiting the sale of pornography to adults should be repealed. The report of the commission immediately became a galvanizing political document, with the Nixon administration denouncing it within days of its announcement. See Peter Braunstein, "Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York During the 1970s," in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the 70s (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 129-56.
4.
For an entertaining discussion of this period, and one that illuminates some of the period’s most celebrated directors, including William Friedkin, Francis Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, see Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Also see Aniko Bodroghkozy, "Reel Revolutionaries: An Examination of Hollywood’s Cycle of 1960s Youth Rebellion Films," Cinema Journal 41 (Spring 2002): 38-58, for his well-documented discussion of Hollywood’s search for the youth market.
5.
See the Web site of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting for a full history (http://www .nyc.gov/html/film/html/office/history_moftb.shtml). In 1974, Lindsay’s initiative was further sweetened by Abe Beame, whose Mayor’s Advisory Council on Motion Pictures and Television recruited investment in productions. Also see Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 561-62.
6.
Cannato, Ungovernable City, 562.
7.
See Vincent DiGirolamo, "Such, Such Were the B’Hoys . . . ,"Radical History Review90 (2004): 123-41.
8.
See Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 245.
9.
See Daniel Lazare, America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It (New York: Harcourt , 2001) for an extensive discussion of antiurbanism in U.S. thought and policy, but particularly 191-211 for a detailing of how post-World War II policies created massive subsidies for racially segregated suburbanization, paying whites to move out of cities and trapping African Americans in decaying urban centers. Also see Douglas Noe, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) for his discussion of how public housing inadvertently froze an under class in cities with a declining industrial base during the 1950s and 1960s, 278-82.
10.
Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 150-78, 181-97.
11.
Not incidentally, in 1975 President Gerald Ford denied the city government’s request for assistance in meeting its obligations to bond holders, resulting in New York defaulting on its debt. The famous headline in the October 30, 1975, edition of the New York Daily News was "Ford to City: Drop Dead."
12.
See http://www.bigspringtx.com/, the city’s Web site.
13.
See http://www.idcide.com/citydata/pa/tuscarora.htm and http://www.city-data.com/city/Tuscarora-Pennsylvania.html for details on Tuscarora. Tuscarora is 91 miles from Philadelphia and 121 miles from New York.
14.
See, e.g., Richard Harris , "The Geography of Employment and Residence in New York Since 1950," in John H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage, 1991), 129-52.
15.
See Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II ( New York: New Press, 2000), 145-47.
16.
Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City: African Americans and New Immigrants in Post-Industrial New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 137-55.
17.
Diane Perrons, Globalization and Social Change: People and Places in a Divided World ( New York: Routledge, 2004), 66.
18.
David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 316-17.
19.
See James Traub, The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2004), 116-24.
20.
Robert P.McNamara, The Times Square Hustler: Male Prostitution in New York City ( Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 20-21.
21.
See Harvey, Justice , Nature, 207-326, for an evocative discussion of the changing relationships between time and place through modernity and postmodernity.
22.
See Neil Smith , Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 97-130, and The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York : Routledge, 1996), 51-89.
23.
See Smith, New Urban Frontier, 92-118, for a discussion of the economics of gentrification and William K. Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), 89-106.
24.
Smith, New Urban Frontier, 19.
25.
Ibid., 140-64.
26.
For a discussion of the Knapp Commission’s investigation into police corruption in 1970 and the hearings that resulted in 1971, see Cannato, Ungovernable City, 466-78; for a fairly conservative political and economic analysis of New York’s road to default and one that primarily focuses on city policy and its relationship with municipal workers unions, as well as its participation in the New Deal welfare state, see Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: Free Press, 1997), 197-212.
27.
For overviews of this process, see Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble (New York: Verso, 2002); Giovanni Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994); and Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 60-100.
28.
See Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005), 122-48, for a lucid discussion of this change in the U.S. economy and in the relationships among various regional producers.
29.
Tabb, Long Default, 110-12.
30.
Smith, New Urban Frontier, 80-83.
31.
Mollenkopf and Castells, "Introduction," in John H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., Dual City: Restructuring New York ( New York: Russell Sage, 1991), 7-8.
32.
For a discussion of the urban contours of 1940s and 1950s film noir, see Peter Dickos, Street with No Name: A History of Classic American Film Noir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 62-95, and Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 21-85.
33.
See Jane Jacobs , The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 35-38.
34.
See http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf for these and related demographic statistics. New York’s population rose from 3,437,202 in 1900 to 7,781,984 in 1960, but the city lost population from 1960 to 1980. Cities in the East and Midwest, such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Milwaukee, reported similar patterns of increases and decreases in population during these periods.
35.
Douglas Noe’s discussion of interclass residential patterns in earlier twentieth-century New Haven connects such residential patterns to the health of the city itself. City: Urbanism , 116-35.
36.
Adrienne.Windhoff-Heritier, City of the Poor, City of the Rich: Politics and Policy in New York City (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992 ), 16-17.
37.
Brenner, Boom and Bubble, 16-17, and Ellen Meiksens Wood, Empire of Capital (New York: Verso, 2003), 118-42. Also see Mollenkopf and Castells, "Introduction," 1-17, and Michael Peter Smith, City, State, and Market. (New York and Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 87-117.
38.
Samuel Rosenberg, American Economic Development since 1945 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 164-71. See, e.g., John Agnew, The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 69-88. The rupture of this system had significant economic implications: European economies that were deeply involved with that of the United States also experienced retrenchment. As the United States sought for its major creditors to forego the conversion of their surplus dollars for gold, currency crises were triggered throughout Western Europe.
39.
Perrons, Globalization and Social Change, 113-17.
40.
Joanna Brewis and Stephen Linstead, Sex, Work and Sex Work: Eroticizing Organization (New York: Routledge , 2000), 190-91.
41.
See Rosemary Hennessey for an intriguing discussion of the sexual division of labor at the point of industrialization in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 25.
